See these twoarticles for an explanation of the differences between Stable/Beta/Dev, as well as Chromium vs. Chrome and the version numbers.

Configuration

File associations

Unlike Firefox, Chromium does not maintain its own database of mimetype-to-application associations. Instead, it relies on xdg-open to open files and other mime types, for example, magnet links.

There are exceptions to this rule though. In the case of mailto URIs, Chromium calls out to xdg-email which is similar to xdg-open. Other protocol handlers may have equivalent scripts so check /usr/bin/xdg*.

The behaviour of xdg-* tools is managed automatically in environments such as GNOME, KDE, Xfce or LXDE, but does not work in others. Usually this behaviour can be fixed by tricking them into thinking that they are operating in one of the supported desktop environments. Depending on your environment one may work and another will not so trying each is recommended. You can set the desktop environment with the following variable:

export DE=INSERT_DE_HERE

where the recognised desktop environments are: gnome, kde, xfce and lxde. For the variable to be always set, put it somewhere like ~/.xinitrc or ~/.bashrc.

An alternative is to edit the xdg-open or xdg-email scripts and hard-code a useful DE. At the bottom of the file you will see something like this:

xdg-open and xdg-email fall back to this list of browsers and will use the first that they find to attempt to open the URI. You could add the name of the application to the beginning of the list. However there is no guarantee that the application will be called correctly to meet your needs, e.g. your mail client will open but it will not correctly receive the mailto address. Also it will only work for one application.

A fourth option is to make a softlink from your preferred application to one of the names on the browser list. This approach has the same problems as the previous work around. For more discussion on these ideas see this forum thread.

Font Rendering

Chromium is now supposed to use the settings in ~/.fonts.conf, though you may have to edit it manually (see Font Configuration). If the fonts are still rendered badly, you can use Xft settings as suggested here. Create ~/.Xresources if it does not exist and add in:

Flash Player

The Adobe Flash plugin can be installed with the package flashplugin, available in the official repositories.

While the classic Flash plugin will not be updated for Linux, Chromium can use the Flash plugin from Google Chrome (that uses the new Pepper API). This plugin is available in the AUR with the chromium-pepper-flashAUR or chromium-pepper-flash-stableAUR packages.

Note: Make sure to enable the Flash plugin with location /usr/lib/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so in chrome://plugins and disable the plugin with location /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so.

If Pepper Flash doesn't show up in the plugins list (as is the case for Iron) then disable libflashplayer.so and start with the following command.

Tips and Tricks

Troubleshooting

Proxy Settings

There have been many situations in which proxy settings do not work properly, especially if set through the KDE interface. A good method as of now is to use Chromium's command-line options, like --proxy-pac-url and --proxy-server, to set your proxy.

Default profile

If you cannot get your default profile when you try to run Chromium and get a similar error instead:

WebGL

Sometimes, Chromium will disable WebGL with certain graphics card configurations. This can generally be remedied by typing about:flags into the URL bar and enabling the WebGL flag. You may also enable WebGL by passing the command line flag --enable-webgl to Chromium in the terminal.

There is also the possibility that your graphics card has been blacklisted by Chromium. To override this, pass the flag --ignore-gpu-blacklist when starting Chromium, alternatively, go to about:flags and enable Override software rendering list.

Pulseaudio & PA-Alsa-Bridge & Pepper-Flash

Given a certain version of Chrome (23.x seem to exhibit this problem) and Pepper-Flash (11.x) while using the PA-Alsa-Bridge, sound may not play, become distorted, start skipping or outright keep crashing the PA-Alsa-Bridge continously. See [1] for the bugreport.

A possible workaround is to use pasuspender to suspend Pulseaudio and force Chrome to use Alsa directly.

First, create an ~/.asoundrc file to default Alsa to your real hardware instead of Pulseaudio. See Alsa and [2] for more information. Exemplary ~/.asoundrc:

~/.asoundrc

pcm. !default {
type hw
card 0
device 0
}

Then use pasuspender to suspend Pulseaudio and force Chrome to use Alsa which now uses your real hardware.